On September 26, the participants of the programme met in Strasbourg, France, for the third step of the programme. The title of this working session was “Organisational Bottlenecks”. The aim of this Milestone was to identify the main organisational hurdles of city governments in placemaking processes, and explore potential solutions to enhance their effectiveness.
With this workshop, we intended to:
- analyse where placemaking is located within the cities’ organisation structures and reflect on its implications,
- identify the common organisational barriers that hinder effective placemaking processes,
- explore strategies to overcome bureaucratic obstacles and streamline the placemaking process.
For the Organisational Bottlenecks workshop, participants worked from the content and findings of the previous milestone, where three main pillars of creative bureaucracy were presented:
- rethinking rules/regulations and incentives for the 21st century;
- enriching the inner life of bureaucracies;
- building trusting relationships with the civic and business worlds.
Public administrations are often perceived as not applying creative solutions and innovations. The aim of this part of the workshop was to explore the creative conditions that can help transform the approach of public institutions by turning problems into opportunities, and to identify the conditions that hinder the transformative potential of organisations. For this purpose – the Placemaking Embeddedness Scale was introduced by our guests – Charles Landry and Robyn Bennett from the Creative Bureaucracy Festival and gamified situational analysis was used to work within the city groups.
The Workshop was followed by 4 days at the Placemaking Week Europe festival during which many of the Cities in Placemaking group representatives shared their knowledge, experiences and learnings with the other participants.
Have a look at the report and feel free to share it further!
